Chapter 1: The Weight of Death
The world returned in fragments white ceiling tiles, the antiseptic bite of disinfectant, the steady rhythm of machines measuring a heartbeat that shouldn't exist.
Yasuo's eyes snapped open, his chest heaving as phantom pain lanced through his ribs. His hand flew to where Yone's blade had pierced him, expecting blood, expecting the ragged tear of steel through flesh and bone. Instead, his fingers found only smooth skin beneath thin hospital fabric. The memory burned behind his eyes with crystalline clarity: his brother's face, twisted with righteous fury. The cold bite of steel. The taste of copper flooding his mouth as darkness claimed him.
I died.
The certainty of it settled in his bones like winter frost. He had felt his life drain away, felt the world fade to nothing. Death was not something you mistook for sleep.
Yet here he was. Breathing. Alive.
Yasuo pushed himself upright, and his body responded with startling ease. No weakness. No lingering wounds. He flexed his fingers, and power coursed through muscles that felt simultaneously familiar and foreign. His arms looked leaner, younger the old scars from countless duels faded to pale shadows. When he caught his reflection in the darkened television screen mounted on the wall, a stranger stared back. The same face, but stripped of years. His jaw sharper. His eyes clearer.
Twenty-three again, perhaps. Maybe younger.
Before he could process this impossibility, his vision shifted without warning. The world exploded into layers of color and motion, patterns of energy flowing through walls and ceiling like rivers of light he'd never perceived before. His Sharingan had activated on its own, responding to his confusion with instinctive defense. But what it showed him made no sense. The energy signatures were wrong completely alien to anything he'd encountered in Ionia, Noxus, or beyond. These weren't the familiar flows of spiritual energy or elemental magic. This was something else entirely, something that hummed with technological precision rather than natural harmony.
Yasuo closed his eyes, forcing his breathing to steady. The Sharingan receded reluctantly, leaving normal vision in its wake. He needed to think. To understand. The last thing he remembered was accepting his death at Yone's hands, the justice he'd run from for so long finally catching up. Had the wind spirits intervened? Impossible they had long since abandoned him after Elder Souma's murder. Had some enemy captured his soul for torment?
The door opened with a soft pneumatic hiss.
"Oh, you're awake!" A woman in blue scrubs entered, her face brightening with professional warmth. She carried a tablet and wore a badge that read St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital. "That's wonderful. How are you feeling? Any pain, dizziness, nausea?"
Yasuo stared at her, his mind struggling to catch up. The words should have meant nothing the sounds were completely foreign to any language he knew. Yet somehow, impossibly, he understood every syllable with perfect clarity. English, his mind supplied, though he'd never heard the language before in his life.
"Where..." His voice came out rough, unused. He swallowed and tried again. "Where am I?"
"St. Luke's Hospital, Manhattan." The nurse approached, checking the monitors beside his bed with practiced efficiency. "You were brought in three days ago. Found unconscious in Central Park with no identification. We've been trying to figure out who you are." She glanced at him with gentle concern. "Do you remember your name?"
"Yasuo." The word felt like the only truth in a world gone mad.
"Yasuo," she repeated, typing on her tablet. "That's good. And do you remember what happened to you? The paramedics said you appeared to have significant trauma, but by the time you arrived here..." She trailed off, clearly puzzled. "Well, the doctors couldn't find anything wrong with you. It's honestly remarkable."
Remarkable. The understatement nearly drew a bitter laugh from his throat. He'd died and been reborn in a body that wasn't quite his own, in a place that spoke impossible languages, surrounded by technology he couldn't begin to understand. The machines around him beeped and whirred with purposes he could only guess at.
"I need to leave." Yasuo swung his legs over the side of the bed, ignoring the nurse's protests. His bare feet touched cold linoleum, and he stood on steady legs that held his weight without tremor. The hospital gown barely covered him, but modesty seemed absurd when reality itself had shattered.
"Mr. Yasuo, please, you need to wait for the doctor to discharge you. We still need to run some tests, and "
"I said I'm leaving." He moved toward the door, each step feeling surreal. The building around him pulsed with that strange energy, visible even without activating his Sharingan. Lights hummed in the ceiling. Machines whispered to each other in electronic tongues. Everything was wrong, displaced, impossible.
The nurse stepped in front of him, her expression shifting from concern to firm professionalism. "I understand you're confused, but I can't let you just walk out. You were brought in as a John Doe. The police want to talk to you. And medically, we need to "
Alarms began screaming.
The sound ripped through the hospital like a physical force, high-pitched and urgent. Red lights flashed in the hallway outside. The nurse's head snapped toward the door, her eyes widening. Other voices joined the chaos shouts, running footsteps, the crash of equipment being hastily moved.
Yasuo moved to the window, drawn by instinct. His room overlooked the city, and what a city it was. Buildings stretched toward the sky like mountains of glass and steel, taller than any structure he'd ever imagined. Thousands of windows reflected the afternoon sun. Streets far below teemed with vehicles that moved without horses, without any visible means of propulsion.
This wasn't Ionia. This wasn't Runeterra. This was something else entirely.
And then he saw it.
A figure streaked across the sky, moving faster than any arrow, any bird, any wind technique Yasuo had ever witnessed. Red and gold armor gleamed in the sunlight, leaving a trail of displaced air in its wake. The figure banked hard around a building, jets of flame propelling it with impossible grace and speed. It was a man or something shaped like one flying through the air as naturally as Yasuo might walk down a street.
The world tilted beneath Yasuo's feet.
In Runeterra, flight was the domain of dragons, of ancient spirits, of rare and powerful magic wielded by legends. Not this. Not a man in armor soaring through the sky above a city of millions like it was the most natural thing in the world.
Behind him, the nurse was speaking urgently into a phone, but her words faded to meaningless noise. Yasuo pressed his hand against the cool glass, his Sharingan activating involuntarily again. Through its enhanced perception, he could see the incredible detail of the flying figure the precision engineering of the armor, the controlled bursts of energy propelling it, the way it banked and accelerated with mathematical perfection.
Technology. Not magic. Technology so advanced it might as well be sorcery.
"What is this place?" Yasuo whispered, his breath fogging the window.
The flying man vanished between buildings, heading toward whatever emergency had triggered the alarms. And Yasuo stood in a hospital room in a world he didn't recognize, in a body that shouldn't exist, watching impossibilities unfold before eyes that could see too much.
He had died seeking redemption. Instead, he'd found something far stranger a second chance in a world where the very laws of reality had been rewritten.